Paper Clippings The Blog of The Crossroads Cultural Center

Paper Clippings, more than a classical blog, is a service providing valuable reading material in order to help readers reach a judgment about current affairs. Comments and discussion are more than welcome.

traditional religious groups essentially must either abandon any religious beliefs that conflict with the ideologies of the state, notably that of radical feminism, or cease to make any claims to special financial considerations for their charitable, non-profit works for the community.

I think what’s at stake ultimately is whether the church is answerable finally to the State as the only court of appeal or whether the church can rightly appeal to other sources for its moral compass and whatever one’s views on this particular issue.

The article by David Cameron, the British Conservative leader, is very symbolic of the time we are living. It means to be a philosophical statement, yet there is not one discernible idea (teaching English to everybody? That's it?). It is obsessed with identity, yet it shows a complete lack of it. In fact, it does not distinguish itself in any way from the opposite political side. When both sides have coalesced into complete cultural vacuum, what's left in democracy?

The spanking controversy is another example of disappearing common sense (in the literal sense: a set of shared judgements based on real-life experience and passed on, often implicitly, from a generation to the next.)

The Tablet has a story on the booming phenomenon of avatars (having an alternative self living in an imaginary digital universe). The problem, however, is not how Christianity can be a better "imaginative option." The question is whether Christianity can help us live reality so that don't feel the need to escape from it.